Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!think!think.com!barmar From: barmar@think.com Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: X-terms v. PCs v. Workstations Message-ID: <31830@news.Think.COM> Date: 30 Nov 89 17:36:55 GMT References: <1989Nov28.125728.6774@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> <40009@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> <2992@uceng.UC.EDU> Sender: news@Think.COM Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge MA Lines: 40 In article <2992@uceng.UC.EDU> dmocsny@uceng.UC.EDU (daniel mocsny) writes: >Consider the analogies between transportation and computation >technologies. Good analogy. However.... >But how many people prefer to drive an automobile instead of taking >mass transit? What do you think the answer would be if the automobile owner had to put the car together himself, had to maintain it himself, and had to maintain his own roads. That's the situation in an anarchic workstation environment -- every user for himself. With a centralized organization, there are people responsible for configuring systems, maintaining them, and maintaining the shared resources such as networks, modems, and printers. At our company we have nearly 200 Suns (about a dozen of which are file and/or compute servers) and about a half-dozen Vaxes (a 785, an 8800, and some 83xx and 6xxx). Back in the pre-Sun days, when we had one or two Vaxes that everyone used we developed lots of local software. As we've moved into the workstation environment the users still expect to find that same environment. At first we were using the anarchy mechanism. The first few people to get workstations were the kinds of people who could administer themselves. But now that every developer has one they generally expect everything to "just work", and when it doesn't they want someone to complain to. In order for us to respond to problems we need to maintain some measure of control over how each department uses their resources. We're trying a middle-of-the-road solution now. Each department has a couple of people whose part-time responsibility is to manage that department's resources. However, since the central organization still has the ultimate responsibility, we have to be able to understand their configuration, so they can't vary their configurations too far from the company norm. Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp. barmar@think.com {uunet,harvard}!think!barmar Brought to you by Super Global Mega Corp .com